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Originally recorded: February 6, 2025
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Well, I guess all's well that ends well.

Admittedly, I went into this session with a plan in mind: try to beat the game's final gauntlet by sheer force of will... and if I don't do it by 1AM, I'll resort to save states, if only to showcase the game's ending. But you know that old saying -- no plan survives first contact with the enemy. As the night progressed, I got closer and closer to winning, so I abandoned my plan of wussing out for the sake of completion. Instead, I decided that it might be more suitable to devote one additional stream towards tackling it. Of course, that had the added handicap of losing out on the muscle memory I had developed this time. But fortunately, it didn't come to that. So, while it took longer than I would've wanted it to, this session ended up being a success, more or less.

I already had a bunch of practice last time at beating Scratch and Dirtbag on a single health bar, but I still had to learn how to beat Triceratron and Scale-Head reliably before figuring off ol' Shred-Head and his alter ego. As it turns out, Triceratron was definitely the easier of the two after you learn his pattern. Honestly, the lightning attack is probably the biggest danger in that fight -- all of his other attacks have incredibly obvious tells. Scale-Head, on the other hand, is more of a crapshoot. Baiting his insanely long-ranged tail whip and hitting him during his recovery is probably the best way to damage him. His cannonball attack is also pretty unpredictable, but can give you a free hit if it lands just the right way. That being said, if he begins camping out in the middle of the stage, you're toast.

That just leaves Shredder and Cyber-Shredder as the final boss fight. They both fight incredibly similar, they use the same sprites for the most part, it's just that the second form has a few extra attacks. Yet somehow, that annoying little close-range kick ended up being the attack that got under my skin the most. At first, I tried just making it to the first form -- even without the healing pizza -- just to learn his pattern. KI eventually suggested pivoting over to aborting any run where I lost my pizza once I got a handle for that, simply because there was no way I could guarantee even make it to Cyber-Shredder without it. Of course, other sources suggested doing that from the get-go, but I wanted enough practice against OG Shredder for a successful run.

When I finally beat him, I immediately made a save state. Sure, you get a full health recharge after beating Cyber-Shredder, but I didn't want to take any chances. After all, the game's final room isn't just a straight shot to April -- there are flame jets all over the place. You're genuinely probably not going to die, but what if my power went out or something like that? My heart just couldn't take doing that all over again.

As I mentioned last time, KI has yet to beat that final boss rush without save states... but the fact that I managed to inspired them to try all over again. But as it turns out, they also didn't manage to find all the health upgrades -- I believe they told me that they had 4 less hit points than I did. I offered my own password, but they wanted to do the whole thing on their own. Yet, despite my efforts to explain the trick I used to effectively give myself "infinite continues" in the Western release, KI quickly opted to swap to the Japanese version, which offers them by default. And then, considering what they've already got on their plate, they opted to put it off for another time. I can't say I blame them, but I've got a feeling that they won't have nearly as hard of a time as I did if they manage to make it to that final gauntlet with max health.